CourseReport.com claims that schools and camps teaching programming, often called “coding,” will bring in $60 million in tuition for the year and graduate 5,987 coders, a 175 percent increase over last year. Tuition can cost up to $20,000, with the average around $10,000 for courses ranging from nine to 12 weeks. All in all, this seems expensive to us.

You can try teaching yourself programming instead. Many have done it and it can even be fun. What’s hot now is the programming language “Ruby.” Head over to Oreilly.com, QuePublishing.com, or NoStarch.com for books on the subject. If you go on Quora.com and search “I am 24 and want to be a programmer” you can read how one woman built her Spitfire app, using Meetup.com to meet fellow programmers and free resources such as “Learn Ruby the Hard Way,” “Try Ruby,” CodeAcademy, “Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby,” “Ruby on Rails,” and “Railscasts.”